USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Religious Education Association : proceedings of the first annual convention, Chicago, February 10-12, 1903 > Part 17
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How can the Sunday-school curriculum be advanced so as to do more fully the work of the Sunday school as a school ? The answer must be sought along the line of least resistance and by the most natural method of approach. The wisdom of experience points the way.
I. Make use of a supplemental lesson. Let this be graded ; put it in the form of a text-book, cards, or leaf- lets. Give the first ten minutes of the teaching hour to the supplemental lesson. Require an examination and system of promotion from one grade to another. Train the teachers of each grade how to teach the supplemen- tal lesson of the grade. This is no mere theory. For be it remembered that the International Primary Teach-
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ers' Department is doing this very thing. It has graded supplemental lessons for the three elementary grades- the beginners', the primary, and the junior; and for years grade meetings have been held by Primary Unions over the land and in summer schools. Now apply this method to every department of the school, and a long step will be taken toward a properly graded lesson for every department.
2. The teaching function of the office of the ministry must be magnified. Pastors of churches are the respon- sible, God-appointed leaders. There is no more pressing need, no more imperative call, than the training of can- didates for the ministry in the principles and methods of teaching and of child-study. A chair of pedagogy should be established in every theological seminary. Can this Convention do any more important work than to start a campaign for the training of ministers in pedagogy as applied to the work of the church ? Is not the teaching function of the church her most ancient and character- istic one, lying at the very heart of her commission ?
3. More time must be given to the work of the Sunday school. The traditional division of time on Sunday must be gradually readjusted in order to make a serious Sun- day-school session possible. At present, and probably for a long time to come, the heart-side of the Bible les- son is and will be emphasized on Sunday. The supple- mental lesson will to some extent complement this by its systematic work of instruction. But this educational work is necessarily limited.
If religious knowledge is all-important, if the training of the will must be secured through the intellect as well as the feeling, why not plan for a Saturday session of the Sunday school? The educational side of the school's work demands an extra session at least for a part of the school. A Saturday session is practicable for the ele- mentary grade and for children of the secondary school
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age and beyond; say, from twelve to eighteen years. Fewer teachers but trained ones could do this work. The Saturday school session could combine the gymnasia features of the church's numerous organizations, through its several classes. That is to say, the Sunday-school classes could be organized as boys' clubs, girls' clubs, mission-study sections, junior C. E. bands, etc.
A radical program, you say. But would it not seem that only in this way can religious teaching be brought under the influence of those principles and methods which have so vitalized all secular teaching ? Supple- mental graded lessons, the pastor as the teacher of teachers, Saturday sessions for the importation of reli- gious knowledge and training in Christian service-these things ought to be done because of their fundamental importance. What ought to be done can be done.
REV. WILLIAM J. MUTCH, PH.D., PASTOR HOWARD AVENUE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
In speaking of the tools one does not forget that they are secondary to the work which the tools are to per- form. Yet in discussing religious education the quality of the tools is not unimportant. A great army of ear- nest and devoted men and women are giving their efforts freely to the work which is laid out for them in the church schools. The manner of their work is almost wholly determined from week to week by the lesson- helps which are put into their hands. Their previous preparation has been mostly determined in the same way. What is the result? Let me raise a question whether the teachers have not been injured by the very profusion of helps.
From a sense of their inability teachers have sought for help, and naturally the most immediate and direct help is preferred -the help for today's lesson. Next
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week and next year it is the same. Editors feel that they must furnish what is demanded. But is this the best way? The thing that is wanted is not necessarily the best thing. Do we not owe our teachers a debt of leadership and wise counsel? By furnishing this hand- to-mouth kind of help we are encouraging an improvi- dent habit. It is sure to result in barrenness and weak- ness, in dependence upon helps, and in mechanical instead of vital work.
What can be done through courses, helps, and text- books to lift the work of teachers out of the mechanical methods, and so reach the pupils with better instruction ?
I. We can furnish courses prepared for pupils, with- out teachers' helps made on the hand-to-mouth plan. The teachers can be directed to standard literature and works of reference. Not all teachers may rise to the demand, but most of them will soon learn to ground themselves in a more comprehensive knowledge, will learn, as they have not yet learned, how to use the best books, and will be furnished with a vital message instead of doling out mechanically what the teachers' helps pro- vide. Teachers will then be able to present to their pupils a splendid Christian personality and guidance instead of mere items of curious information like a basket of chips.
2. We can furnish lessons which confine their state- ments and implications to the truth, or at least to those things which a competent committee of scholarly men do not find reason to condemn as being historically incorrect or ethically harmful. This ought to apply rigidly to interpretations of Scripture, to standards of morals, to conceptions of God, and to the estimates and applications of all truth. The note of honesty must be felt in every line, regardless of the standing or falling of revered tenets or texts.
3. We can furnish courses with beginning, middle,
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and end ; courses pedagogically adapted to the several grades, and with variations of subject-matter to include both Scripture in all its aspects and other illustrations of God's glory and power quite as notable as many of those chosen from the Scripture. Each course should have the vital unity arising from the work of single minds rather than be the collaboration of a commission. Such a course will be as broad as the mind which makes it. The courses should be passed upon by competent critics, and, having been approved, they should be given to the world to stand or to fall solely on their merits as com- pared with others similarly offered. It is only by this competitive evolution that the implements of religious education can be brought to the very highest perfection. There is already a very great demand for such courses. The existence of them and the multiplication of them would immensely stimulate that demand.
4. Such courses can be put into permanent and artistic text-books. Do we appreciate how much the respect for the truth depends on the respect for the forms in which it is printed ? There is nothing to which your last Sunday-school quarterly is comparable but a last year's patent-medicine almanac. Permanent text- books, well illustrated, well printed, well bound, made by experts in the three sciences of biblical scholarship or whatever branch the course follows, in psychology of the child-mind, and in the best pedagogy-these books, used and used again until they are worn out, as other text-books are, will be an inestimable power in laying the greatly needed educational foundation for the spiritual life.
REV. SIMEON GILBERT, D.D., CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
It is needful and timely to call attention to still an- other point in the matter of religious education. Beyond
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doubt these are great themes, of commanding moment, which have been set forth with illuminating wisdom by the several eminent educators and speakers of the even- ing. The right organization for the purpose of instruc- tion, the right curriculum of study, the appropriate lesson-helps and text-books, the right kind of teachers -truly, all this would seem to come near filling the whole horizon of our inquiry. What lack we yet ? .
I suppose we are all agreed that a point has been reached in our national educational advancement when the distinctively religious element in the national educa- tion-or, to put it a little differently, the educational element in the religious life of the people-needs to get the decisive reinforcement not only of some new enlight- enment, but also of a new and altogether masterful momentum. To this end there must be power as well as light.
But, let us remember, it will have to be a power of its own kind; the kind of power which touches, at its central point, the very springs of character and life itself. Perhaps the boldest imagery of the old classic mythology was that of Jupiter grasping and wielding in his own right hand all the lightnings of heaven. But an infinitely higher fact in our faith of today is that of Jesus Christ holding in himself, not the secret of all wis- dom only, but of all power in heaven and on earth. Accordingly, the large proposition which this Conven- tion now faces is simply this-nothing less than this- the religious education of America. Here, then, is some- thing to be done. Here is something large enough to appeal to all of us, and to all there is in us. And, pre- eminently, here is an undertaking that calls for power. And is it not power for which we, as religious educators all over the land, are waiting ?
I would speak of the sacramental in religious educa- tion. And what, exactly, do we mean by this? The
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word "sacrament," in its first usage, denoted the Roman soldier's oath of allegiance, body and soul, to Cæsar, and perfect devotion to the word of authority above him. But the word as now used, though not biblical, is dis- tinctively Christian, and as such has its own meaning. It denotes an act which, while it is distinctly and freely hu- man and natural, is at the same time completedly divine, in perfect unison the one with the other; the one per- fected in its naturalness and its power by the other.
In this divinely bold task of making America prac- tically and actually Christian, religious through and through, the Sunday school has its own burden of re- sponsibility. To do its part, as we all feel,-perhaps feel more pungently now than ever,-there is need of some tremendously augmented educative power ; a power in the popular religious education such as can only be rightly conceived of as being simply, naturally, divinely sacramental.
When the Master, teaching his disciples, took a little child and set him in their midst; when Jesus said, "Suffer little children and forbid them not to come unto me ;" when the risen Christ gave that final, soul-testing charge to Peter, bidding him "Feed my lambs ; feed my sheep ; shepherd the flock," he instituted what I believe it to be no misuse of terms to call the "sacrament of education." For in this, as in every other true and real sacrament, there is the one part that is fundamentally human, and the other part that is utterly divine. " The wind bloweth where it listeth ;" though we cannot see its motion, we cannot fail to hear the sound thereof.
It of course is easier to find fault than it is to con- struct ; it is easier to disparage than it is to take hold and help and do. It is easier to point toward the goal than it is to reach it. And yet it is a capital point of advantage gained for any great cause, like this one, when, by a kind of suddenly wakened common sense, leaders
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among the people are brought face to face before some great "open secret " that had for a long while been right before them unheeded. No doubt it is in this way that this Convention for Religious Education is bound to effect its first, if not its most important, result. After this, as the reports of this Convention go forth among the churches and the other religious and educational centers, certain facts and truths which had been more or less vaguely apprehended, will be taken as axiomatic- fresh master-lights to guide us in the infinitely urgent business that waits on our doing.
But if there is need of light, quite as certainly is there need of power. Especially at this point is there need of the power which inspires courage. Here is our danger ; the danger lest, at the outset, in face of the deadly apathy to be encountered, we shall be daunted, and morally cowed into weakness.
There is no need to mention the more earthly and sordid, or otherwise bewildering influences that are in the air, and which tend to stifle religious aspiration and deaden the thought of God. To meet and cope with this dominating secularism, there must be a new kind of courage-a moral and spiritual courage, electric and dynamic enough to be contagious.
At the last annual meeting of the National Educa- tional Association, at which were assembled some ten thousand teachers from all parts of the country, the clear-seeing and intrepid president of Columbia Univer- sity, Nicholas Murray Butler, did speak the courageous word, and the great convention formally voiced it again in a noble utterance as to the world's supreme classic and the educational need of it in all the public schools in the land. If, now, this national religious educational Convention shall do something to give new "face" and vogue to this kind of courage, it will be plain that it did not forget its mission.
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But amid all that is being so justly, so wisely, so nobly said in this Convention, the point must not be lost sight of where the dismalest failure is liable to come in. It is, indeed, an illustrious conclave of university and other academical educators who are moving together in this matter. This is a shining omen for our great cause. There is promise and power in it. There has never been anything just like it before. Nevertheless, is it out of place or untimely to suggest that however academically fine, however psychologically up-to-date, however peda- gogically acute and orderly the new teaching may be, however illuminated historically and critically the instruc- tion about the Bible, the supreme thing for the Sunday school, as for all other religious teaching, will still be its power ; the power there will be in it, through the ineffable grace of personality instinct with the divine potentiality, to turn its whole work into the true and divinely authenticated educational sacrament, and so bring one by one its members into the real presence of Christ himself.
Nor, in this connection, would it be even pedagogi- cally discerning to leave in the background of considera- tion that educative power, no less potential because so subtle, which inheres in the mystic self-outgoing in the use of the true hymn and song. Throughout the Chris- tian centuries every great communion has been perpetu- ated very largely by the educative potency of its song service. Though the sermons were little enough under- stood by the people, the hymn has had its own way of sliding into the memory and captivating the heart. From the beginning it has been almost the glory of the Sunday school that it has understood so well-not so well as perhaps will yet be the case-the value of its sacred hymnody, at its best, in its own sweet, potential sacrament of the Christian education. As for this kind of power, the new pedagogy will never discover a substitute.
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When the next steps have been taken in this widen- ing and advancing movement, there assuredly will be no disposition on the part of anyone to make light of the work which dear old Robert Raikes found next at hand, when, under God, it was given him to start this tran- scendently beneficent undertaking. Neither will there be a disposition on the part of any wise helpers in the present movement to hint or to say disparaging things as to that other great distinct new movement in the reli- gious education of thirty years ago, which has already resulted in the creation of a clearly defined new epoch in modern educational and religious history ; a movement which had the inexpressible advantage of having been taken up at the right psychological moment.
Is it true, however, that during the past few years the forward movement has lagged somewhat? Possibly. And yet the mightiest river knows how to bend its course without abandoning its pathway to the sea. But this, also, is true; there has of late been an altogether extra- ordinary measure of quiet, deep, self-convincing think- ing on the part of individual Christian teachers and workers, especially among the more religiously disposed educators, in all parts of the country, and a putting of heads and hearts together, to see-at least to try to see-what next and more nobly adequate might be done and should be done. It is because of the fact of this widespread and pervasive-although mainly unher- alded -preparation that has long been going on, that one may be so sure that the great new purpose is not to be left to "disband on the lips and untie in the air." There is a decisive cogency in the logic of events that may be trusted.
While few mercies are greater than to be freed from conceit, and kept from stumbling over one's own shadow, half the secret of the true leadership is in the heart that is quick to see which way and whereunto the Master himself is leading on.
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If only it were possible, at this moment, for some strong artist to project, as it were, upon some broad illu- minated screen the shining portraitures, in lofty com- radeship, as in sight of all the millions in our Sunday schools and our public schools, of, say, Robert Raikes and Friedrich Fröbel, Horace Mann and D. L. Moody, Immanuel Kant and Phillips Brooks, John Harvard and Charles G. Finney, Lord Shaftesbury and Abraham Lin- coln, Mark Hopkins and Stephen Paxton, John H. Vin- cent and H. C. Trumbull, and lo, before them all, with the little child in the midst, the transcendent figure of the Lord and Teacher of us all! There, there, as it seems to me, would be signalized and typified in its com- posite picturing, the supreme meaning, the all-inspiring aim of this historic Convention, as of those who, joined in the business of the religious education of America, wait to be energized with power, eager to have part in the great and so gracious sacrament of the national religious education.
PRAYER
REV. SPENSER B. MEESER, D:D.,
PASTOR WOODWARD AVENUE BAPTIST CHURCH, DETROIT, MICHIGAN
Oh, Thou who art the Way, the Truth and the Life, Guide, Teacher and Redeemer, we commit to thee now the deliberations of the day and trustingly pray thee that thou wilt pardon our missteps, make true whatever has been false, and flood our life with the light from above. We entrust our work to thee, to whom were spoken the first fond prayers our lips in childhood framed.
O Lord and Master of us all, Whate'er our name or sign, We own thy sway, we hear thy call, We test our lives by thine.
And now may grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ abide upon each one of us forevermore. Amen.
FIFTH SESSION
PRAYER
PROFESSOR MILTON S. TERRY, D.D., GARRETT BIBLICAL INSTITUTE, EVANSTON, ILLINOIS
Our Father who art in the heavens, thou art the great and ever-blessed God in whom we live and move and have our being. Thou hast so loved us, thou hast so loved the world, as to give thine only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have eternal life ; and thou dost send thy blessed Holy Spirit into our hearts, crying Abba, Father!
We look to thee at this hour, for all our help must come from thee. Direct us, O Lord, by thy living Spirit in all our counsels together here, and in all the thoughts and meditations of our hearts. Give wisdom to thy ser- vants who shall address this assembly. Give wisdom to us all and teach us thy ways, and help us to understand more and more the mysteries of the kingdom of God. O that we may have the wisdom which cometh from above to direct us in all our work for thee. Help us that we may be skilful laborers in thy vineyard, doing the will of our Heavenly Master and following the living Christ all our days. Send thy Spirit into our hearts, the Spirit of illumination, the Spirit of counsel and might, that will lift us up and help us in all our Christian work.
We pray for thy blessing upon all the churches, and upon the ministers of our Lord Jesus Christ, that they may be clothed with power from above, and may be able to preach the unsearchable riches of thy gospel, and bring the word of thy truth as a saving message to many, many souls.
We pray for thy blessing upon our homes and families,
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our children, our Sunday schools, and all our schools of learning. O Lord, work through all these agencies, work by every organization that has for its object the advance- ment of thy kingdom and the building up of thy church. Give wisdom to those who lead in thy church everywhere. Pour out thy Holy Spirit abundantly upon all thy peo- ple, and strengthen and sustain them in their works of Christian love.
Now, direct us, we beseech thee, by thy counsel, and bless abundantly the work of thy servants this day. And to thy blessed name be the glory in Jesus Christ our Lord, who has taught us to say :
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And for- give us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for- ever. Amen.
THE SCOPE AND PURPOSE OF THE NEW ORGANIZATION
PRESIDENT WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER, PH.D., D.D., LL.D., THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
It is a source of very great disappointment to all of us, and I am sure I may say especially to myself, that the eminent gentleman whose name was placed upon the preliminary program for the address this morning cannot be with us. President Butler of Columbia University, as many of you know, has been called by divine Providence to pass through very deep waters in these last weeks- the greatest sorrow perhaps which can come to a man has come to him-and it has left him unable to meet the engagement which he would otherwise have been glad to fulfil. President Butler has been in close touch with the preliminary work of this Convention for the past six months, and it is the occasion of very great regret to him that he cannot be with us in this meeting.
I thought that I should like to have my words this morning entirely within your reach; so I have had a syllabus printed, which the ushers will now distribute. It contains twenty propositions relating to the scope and purpose of the new organization.
I should like, first of all, to deny that I am in any way the author of any one of these propositions. This sheet is a composite affair ; it contains, so far as I am able to understand it-and I think perhaps I understand a part of it-the consensus of opinion of many persons, so far as it was possible to secure such a consensus. It may fairly and honestly be said that one hundred men, perhaps two hundred, have contributed to this small sheet of four pages. I shall do nothing but read the proposi-
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tions, and the eminent gentlemen who follow will discuss them. The first proposition stands by itself :
I. The desirability of a new organization depends upon the scope and purpose conceived of in connection with the proposed organization. No new organization is needed merely to antagonize and to disturb organiza- tions already in the field, or merely to duplicate the work of such organizations.
Unless, therefore, there is a scope and a purpose for this proposed organization which will give it a field out- side of and above or beyond organizations now in exist- ence, there is no excuse for its establishment ; and I believe that that is the opinion of every man and woman in this Convention.
The second, third and fourth propositions relate to the service which may be expected of such an organiza- tion.
2. The new organization, if established, will undertake to render service in unifying the efforts of the different agencies already engaged in various lines of work ; in correlating the forces already established, to the end that these agencies may accomplish even larger results than have yet been accomplished. The acceptance of such service on the part of the other organizations and agencies will of course be wholly voluntary, and will in no case involve giving up of independent positions ; for the work of the new organization will be something like that of a clearing-house.
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